Author: Bastiaan

These days young children get tablets and phones, but I also want mine to have PC skills. Written below are my experiences, all children are different and have different interest, so your results my be different in what they like. These are the apps that my daughter enjoyed at different ages.
Tips:

Buy a small mouse (travel mouse)

Buy a laptop from every Windows generation (I have one for DOS, Windows ME, Windows XP, Windows 7)

The Xbox 360 is nearing the end of its life. Time to hack it! I know I am late to the game but I love old game consoles. The difficulty right now is that there is so much out dated information about modding the Xbox 360 on the internet that it is kind of hard to find the relevant bits. I have decided that I want to be able to play any game (backup and Xbox Live Arcade (XBLA)) and don’t care about playing online. This can only be done by installing a mod chip in the Xbox, I have chosen the Team Xecuter Coolrunner 4 XL. I bought mine in Canada from Modchipcentral.

The big picture is that the Xbox is vulnerable to a hardware hack that allows unauthorized software to run on the Xbox. To do this you need to do two major things:

Install unauthorized software

Add hardware hack

The world of the Xbox modders uses some fancy words for all these modifications. The software on the Xbox is usually called the NAND and the latest hardware hack is called the Rest Glitch Hack 2 (RGH2), the Coolrunner 4 implements the RGH2.

First of all we need to replace the Xbox’s software (aka firmware aka NAND). To do this you need some hardware, I bought Team Xecuter’s J-R Programmer V2.

The J-R Programmer has 7 wires which need to be connected to the motherboard, they should be connected to the motherboard like in the image on the right (Trinity motherboard, use Google for other motherboards). I initially bought an Quick Solder Board (QSB), but could not read the NAND with it, so I just soldered the wires right onto the motherboard.

Next up is reading the original NAND with the J-R Programmer and software called J-Runner.

Before you can use J-Runner you need to install Windows drivers for the J-R Programmer:

Keep the file you read in a save place, this is your original Xbox’s software! The problem now is that this software is encrypted. To be able to decrypt it we need a key, which is stored in the Xbox’s CPU. To retrieve this key we need to flash a certain program to the Xbox’s Nand (Xell), to make this software you need to click the “Create ECC” button in J-Runner. Write Xell to your Xbox’s Nand by clicking “Write ECC” button in J-Runner.

If you would now try to turn on your Xbox it would try to load the Xell software, but the Xbox would not allow this software to run. So now we need to install the RGH in the Xbox so that the Xbox will allow Xell to load.

The Coolrunner 4 XL connects with 5 wires to the motherboard (find your points with Google), I found this one the hardest to connect:

Once the Coolrunner is installed, connect your Xbox to a TV and turn it on. If everything is alright you should see Xell on your TV. It will tell you your CPU key. Take a picture of the screen. Turn off your Xbox.

The next step is to decrypt the original Nand with the CPU key and create a new Nand to flash to your Xbox. Put the CPU key in J-Runner and click the “Create XeBuild Image” button. (You might have to download the latest dashboard on the left.) Now write the new Nand to your Xbox and your done!

Well sort off, when you now turn on your Xbox it will look like nothing has changed. However your Xbox will now be able to run unauthorized software.

Install XeXmenu on your Xbox, from XeXMenu install the Aurora dashboard and Dashlauncher. Dashlauncher can be used to boot the Xbox by default to Aurora.

Add XBLA content to your Xbox with “360 Content Manager”.

Set game paths in Aurora via the “Settings” menu.

Download Xbox 360 game iso files and extract them with an extraction tool (eq: ISO extractor or XBOX BACKUP CREATOR(doesn’t work on Win10 anymore)) and put the game on your Xbox 360.

The TranSystems 747A+ is a GPS data logger (also called trip recorder, GPS recorder, etc). It can record your position at a certain time in its internal memory. It can store about 125.000 of these time/position points in its internal memory.

I take this device with me on trips and vacations. Afterward it allows me to create a Google Earth KML file to show where I have been. It also allows me to geotag my photos because the photo camera stores the time the picture has been taken. With some software it is possible to combine the GPS logger data with the picture data and write the GPS location into the picture (EXIF).

This is very nice, however the internal memory of the GPS logger is not big enough to hold more than a couple of days worth of location data. So to be able to use this device during a long trip the memory needs to be downloaded regularly and the memory wiped. This is normally done with a computer and some software like BT747 or MTKbabel. These require a computer or compatible mobile phone to work. Android is unfortunately not supported.

Since I don’t want to carry a big computer and I like programming I started to look into developing an Android program. This is my first Android app. The app is not very advanced, it only allows to download the GPS memory to the Android internal storage and to wipe the internal memory of the GPS device. More functionality might follow.

The app is now published in the Android Market as AndroidMTK, let me know if you have issues.